The Interrelationships Between Adolescents’ Online Affective Perceptions and Momentary Affect: An ESM Study on Affective Social Media Use

Adolescents’ moods have been shown to affect the way in which they perceive their social media use. So far, studies have not investigated reciprocal relationships between moods and perceptions of social media use. The current study used an experience sampling methodology to examine reciprocal relationships between momentary (positive/negative) affect, and adolescents’ (positive/negative) perceptions of their social media use both between and within individuals (N = 116, M_age = 15.57, SD_age = 1.23, 80.2% girls, 19.8% boys). Dynamic structural equation models for chatting and viewing on social media indicated that adolescents’ momentary positive and negative affect were associated with congruent affective perceptions of their chatting and content viewing activities on social media. Furthermore, negative affective perceptions of chatting were associated with momentary negative affect, and positive affective perceptions of content viewing were associated with momentary positive affect. In general, relationships from social media use to momentary affect were stronger than the reverse relationships. Minor differences were observed between the within-person and between-person level.